Journalists visit prisoners held by rebels in Libya

• Posted By: Bryan Chan
• Posted On: 3:37 p.m. | March 23, 2011

By Luis Sinco, Los Angeles Times

Western and Arab journalists were taken by bus today to a location in Benghazi where men accused of fighting on the side of dictator Moammar Kadafi are currently imprisoned.

In a scene out of the movies about the dreaded penal colonies of French Guyana, some 50 Libyan and African men sat quietly against the high walls of a sun-drenched concrete prison yard. High above, the enclosure was ringed with coils of barbed wire. The prisoners looked sullen and downcast, many barefoot, their hands clasped together across their laps.

Peppered all morning by reporters’ questions about rumors of detainees, the opposition government took a page from the Kadafi playbook and arranged the bus tour.

The prisoners looked on as we crowded into the yard, some with fear clearly written on their faces. The whole thing started with one official telling the prisoners to say out loud where they were captured. One by one, the men said Bin Jawwad, Ras Lanuf, Port Brega, Ajdabiya or Benghazi — all scenes of heavy fighting in recent weeks

A middle-aged African waited for a moment before loudly proclaiming his innocence to no one in particular. “I am a worker, not a fighter. They took me from my house and [raped] my wife,” he said, gesturing with his hands. Before he could say much more, a pair of guards told him to shut up and hustled him through the steel doors of a cell block, which quickly slammed behind them.

Several reporters protested and the man was eventually brought back out. He spoke in broken, heavily accented English and it was hard to hear and understand him amid the scrum of scribes pushing closer.

He said his name was Alfusainey Kambi, and again professed innocence before being confronted by an opposition official, who produced two Gambian passports. One was old and tattered and the other new. And for some reason, the official said the documents were proof positive that Kambi was a Kadafi operative.

I moved on to other prisoners who had also been trotted out for photographs and questions. The whole scene had an unsettling feel, as if these men had already been tried and convicted — and all that was left were their executions. In a strange twist, I learned that internal security officers of the Kadafi regime formerly used the facility to detain, torture and kill political dissidents.

A representative from Human Rights Watch looked on silently, taking notes but declining to comment on the proceedings.

All I know is that the Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits prisoners of war from being paraded and questioned before cameras of any kind. But that’s exactly what happened today. The whole incident  just gave me a really bad vibe, and thank God it finally ended.

Times reporter David Zucchino, our interpreter and I skipped the bus ride back and instead got a lift from a passing motorist. In the car, our interpreter, a Libyan national, asked Zucchino: “So what do you think? Should we just go ahead and kill them?”

Just when I thought this war couldn’t get any weirder, it did.

More photos from Libya can be seen here. Read the full story “Libyan rebels appear to take leaf from Kadafi’s playbook.”